


Beyond the Surface Ripples (The Unforeseeable Consequences Remix)

by beanarie



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-07 14:27:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15910104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie
Summary: Knowing that marriage is inevitable does not make it any easier for Miranda to accept.





	Beyond the Surface Ripples (The Unforeseeable Consequences Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wildehack (tyleet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/gifts).
  * Inspired by [each sad lost wave](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10956474) by [Wildehack (tyleet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack). 



> As soon as I read Wildehack's gorgeous, heartbreaking fic, I couldn’t resist exploring Thomas’s charmingly relentless campaign to convince Miranda to marry him. Thank you to the friend who read through it before I posted.

It begins at the wedding of Lucinda Barlow, a cousin who has exchanged words with Miranda perhaps thrice in her entire life. The service, the pastor, and both members of the couple about to sign their lives away in front of their economic peers are all so dull her eyes can hardly stay open. As she limits the length of her blinks, fighting not to tip to the side in a drowse, she makes out a hiss from behind. Rousing a bit, she obediently leans back so Thomas can whisper, “Imagine it is the two of us up there.”

“Why?” she demands. He is twelve. She is fourteen and already aware that she is promised to the second son of Lord Cargill as soon as he comes of age and returns from the colonies. She would just as soon not think about the whole business until she has to. 

“Would it not be an improvement on this?”

The aunt at her left, tutting like a well-fed, arrogant hen, prods her to sit up straight and away from the godless child in the seat behind her. 

~

The ship ferrying the Cargill family back to England is lost in a storm before Miranda has so much as exchanged letters with her intended. Many secondhand respects are paid to her and to her family. She supposes she should feel regretful at this wrinkle added to her formerly secure future. 

She sits, listlessly picking at piano keys in a quiet show of grief. Thomas, the little miscreant, his back to their families, is smiling.

“Now you can-“

“No,” Miranda whispers. 

“Miss Barlow.”

“I will not marry you.”

He averts his gaze, biting his lip. “We could run away together instead.”

Despite being stifled, she can tell her laugh would have been fonder than she’d like it to be. She looks up at a boy finally beginning to grow taller than she. “Where exactly would we go?”

He scarcely takes the time to think about it at all. “Somewhere societal conventions don’t hold quite so much sway.”

For a trickster, he can sound so bloody earnest sometimes. She rolls her eyes and pointedly puts more effort into her playing.

~

The funeral of her friend Mariah requires no effort to make an appearance of grieving. Quite the opposite, in fact. She has to stay in her seat until everyone else has gone so as not to lose her composure in front of witnesses.

Someone quietly sits beside her. Young Mr. Hamilton, as he must be called in public.

“You would protect me from this fate, I expect,” she challenges, tears in her throat. “If we were to marry.”

“Well, I have no interest in children, so in that respect, yes.”

She shakes her head. “You are a young man yet.” And his father wants an heir. They all do.

He says nothing. 

She forces her eyes shut, wetting her cheeks, and feels the warmth of his hand squeezing hers.

~

Social gatherings are something of a conflicting issue for Miranda, with her never entirely digestable opinions, but picnics have long been a net positive. Eating a dessert of stone fruits while absorbing poetry read aloud is pleasant enough that she forgets to long for a book and the solitude of her own home. Out of nowhere, a torrential downpour splits the sky and has everyone running. Wigs pepper the ground as young people in rapidly soaking finery scatter in all directions. Young Mr. Hamilton directs her to the stables, his hand at her lower back. “Just until it stops coming down in sheets,” he says.

Once the huffing and shivering have settled down to a state of near normalcy, he smiles at her in that familiar, knowing, wanting way, absolutely nothing separating him from the tiny imp who could not respect a church service. 

She grimaces at the state of her shoes. “Why me, Thomas?” she says, to stave off another absurd proposal. 

He leans against the wall next to her, momentarily terrible posture making up some of their difference in height. “Is it so difficult to believe a man could admire and care for you?”

She makes an attempt to find a bit of cloth that is not sodden and ends up dragging a damp handkerchief across her dripping forehead. “Over all the young women you have ever had in your acquaintance, yes.”

“Darling.” He turns toward her, all trace of humor gone. The handkerchief falls from her fingers and she meets him halfway. 

As they help each other disrobe, the wheels of her mind turn. She’ll give him this, take something for herself in the meantime, and he’ll forget about the other.

He does not. Thomas never forgets a single thing he has set his mind to.

She never sees that handkerchief again.

~

Days after the ceremony, she still does this, inhabits each spot, taking in that it is now hers, by some definition of the word. Before a visitor, now a mistress of the house. From her vanity she watches Thomas as he sleeps, the rise and fall of his chest, the way he rumples the bedcovers. Hers.

He stirs, groaning softly as he rises, a thin sheet the only thing protecting his modesty (such as it is). “Is that my shirt?”

Miranda places a hand delicately over her mouth and gasps. “Could it be?”

“And those my breeches.”

“Mm.” She finds a perch at the foot of the bed, smiling as he approaches from behind. “They are quite comfortable.”

His arms go around her waist and he rests his chin on her shoulder. “I could take you out like this, some evening. A turn around a coffee house. Smoke some tobacco, trade opinions on the dreary state of the world.” 

“And what’s stopping you?”

The lips at her throat curve into a filthy grin. “What if this fair gentleman should catch the eye of a woman? What exactly would you do?”

“Would I be permitted a snog, My Lord?”

With a hand on either side of her waist, he turns her to face him. Now she can see the intensity in his gaze. “My wife.”

She expected to loathe the way that title sounded in the mouth of her husband. She expected to feel little apart from resentment when he looked upon her. 

“I would consider it a grievous affront if you did not take whatever your heart desires.” He undoes the top two buttons of her (his) collar and plants a kiss at the skin he exposes. Miranda tips her head back as he removes the shirt and pulls her down to lie with him. 

Cousin Lucinda became not only more dull but practically translucent after marriage, having divested herself of any trace of personality following the wedding. Her mother shuts her mouth the instant her father shows the inclination to speak, and has done Miranda’s entire life. Her dear Mariah grew smaller and smaller until she exited the world bringing her child into it. No woman in her sphere of knowledge--some of them vibrant, some talented, some possessed with enviable inner strength--has ever managed to love the man she ended up with. Surely Miranda is not in a position to be _happy_. 

Would life permit that?


End file.
